Psychology Research Seminar Series

An exciting international range of visiting speakers

The School of Psychology hosts an exciting international range of visiting speakers from universities across the world, giving students and staff the opportunity to find out about the latest advances. Details of each talk can be viewed in the abstracts below.

Seminars take place on most Wednesday afternoons between September and March, from 16:00 until 17:00, with tea, coffee, and biscuits available from 15:30 in the 3rd floor seminar room, Link Building. A question and answer session will follow immediately after the talk.

These seminars are not open to the general public, but are for staff and students of Plymouth University and associated institutions.

The Link Building entrance is just behind The House, next to the Roland Levinsky Building. Take the lift to the 3rd floor, and turn right to find the entrance. The seminar room is at the far end of the floor, past the postgraduate research working area. Please pass quietly through this area to avoid disturbing those working here.

Abstracts

Past talks

Forthcoming Seminars:

3 May 2017 Henry OtgaarMaastricht University Remembering and believing in the legal context

Memory plays a vital role in the courtroom. In the majority of criminal trials, forensic technical evidence such as DNA-samples is lacking. Legal professionals such as judges have to base their decisions then on eyewitness testimonies and statements provided by suspects. Since such statements contain recollections of eyewitnesses or suspects, it is of the utmost relevance that memory experts can help legal professionals in educating them about the role of memory in court. Legal cases and experimental studies have shown that people can falsely remember entire traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse which has led to wrongful convictions. In this talk, I will present the latest work on the role of memory in court. I will do this by presenting new work from my lab and will clarify this work with legal cases in which I was involved as an expert witness. Also, I will make the suggestion that in many cases, people do not remember but merely believe that an event occurred and that such beliefs are likely to play a more important part in court than memory.

10 May 2017 Keith Jensen University of Manchester The Heart of Human Sociality

Human prosocial behaviour might be unique in the animal kingdom. The fact that we cooperate on a large scale with nonkin might be underlain by psychological mechanisms not seen in their full form in other species. Other-regarding concerns, concern for the welfare of others, might be a core component of human sociality. While empathy might also us to know something about the feelings of others, we need to care about others so that we act. However, the ability to feel into others and to be concerned about others does not guarantee prosociality. We may also be uniquely antisocial, taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others and distress at their happiness. These concerns can motivate a range of behaviours from helping to punishment, from fairness to spite, from morality to cruelty. In this talk, I will present experimental evidence from human children and chimpanzees to suggest that other-regarding concerns emerge early in children and might not exist in our closest living relatives.

29 March Phil McAleer University of Glasgow First
impressions of speaker personality from voices

Previous work from our group showed that the key personality traits
listeners establish upon hearing novel voices can be reduced to a
two-dimensional space aligned to ratings of Trustworthiness and Dominance.
The 'Social Voice Space' shows remarkable consistency to the main
personality traits found in other domains, including face perception, and
is proposed to drive our decisions of whether to enact approach or
avoidance behaviour. In this talk I will provide a brief summation of the
'Social Voice Space' before presenting results from ongoing work that
looks to establish the stability of such personality judgements across
changing listener and speaker scenarios. I will conclude by outlining work
exploring a proposed positivity bias in older listeners towards younger
voices.

Hyperacuities are a class of visual tasks with exquisitely low
thresholds, with performance ~10 times better than suggested by the spacing
of retinal receptors. For example, human observers can detect misalignment
between two lines (Vernier acuity), or distortions of a circular object
(radial deformation acuity), of the order of a few seconds of arc. This
seminar will illuminate some new clinical applications of hyperacuity
stimuli for vision measurements in clinical practice, and discuss what
innovations will be needed to translate cutting-edge visual psychophysics
into practical clinical tools.

22 FebruaryDaryl O'Connor University of Leeds Karoshi:
Effects of Stress on Health and Wellbeing

This talk will argue that stress may indirectly contribute to
health risk and reduced longevity to the extent that it produces
deleterious changes in diet and/or helps maintain maladaptive health
behaviours (e.g., smoking, alcohol consumption) as well as directly by
influencing biological processes across the life span (e.g., blood
pressure, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning). Studies
investigating the relationship between chronic stress, perseverative
cognition, the cortisol response and health outcomes will be presented.
The second half of the talk will describe recent work investigating the
role of HPA axis responses to stress in suicide attempters and ideators.
The importance of studying the effects of stress across the life course
and developing stress management interventions will also be highlighted.

1 February Sylvia Pan Goldsmiths,
University of London What is Virtual Reality and How Does it Work for
Social Psychologists?

25 January Andy Wills Plymouth
University Progress in modelling through distributed collaboration:
Concepts, tools, and examples

Formal modelling in psychology is failing to live up to its
potential due to a lack of effective collaboration. As a first step
towards solving this problem, the Catlearn Research Group have produced a
set of freely-available tools for distributed collaboration. In this talk,
I'll describe those tools, and the conceptual framework behind them. I'll
also provide concrete examples of how these tools can be used. The
approach I propose enhances, rather than supplants, more traditional forms
of publication. All the resources for this project are freely available
from the catlearn website.

There is increasing acknowledgement that profound changes to
individual behaviour are required in order to tackle climate change, and
yet policies to achieve these changes have so far met with limited
success. Most people are willing to make only very small changes to their
lifestyle - so new ways of encouraging green behaviour which can match the
scale of the climate change challenge are needed. The UK government and
several psychologists have suggested behavioural 'spillover' might be a
way to achieve this. Spillover is the notion that taking up one green
behaviour (e.g., recycling) can lead on to other green behaviours (e.g.,
taking your own bags shopping). Ultimately, this might hold the key to
moving beyond piecemeal behaviour change to achieving more ambitious,
holistic lifestyle change. This seminar will present initial work to
explore when spillover does, does not, and could, occur using: UK
correlational data, a field experiment of the Welsh carrier bag change,
and lab experiments to induce behavioural spillover. Planned work to
explore spillover across diverse cultures will also be outlined.

14 December 2017 Iris
Englehard University of Utrecht How does EMDR work? A dual-task approach
to degrading traumatic memories

7 December 2017 Anne Dowker University of
Oxford Maths Anxiety in Girls

30 November 2016 Laurence
WhitePlymouth University The Origins of Speech
Anti-Rhythm

Placebos are an essential tool in randomised clinical trials, where
they are used to control for bias and contextual healing effects. More
controversially, researchers are developing ways of harnessing placebo
effects for patient benefit in routine medical practice. In this seminar,
I will describe a programme of work investigating professional and lay
attitudes to clinical applications of placebo effects. Our web-based
survey of 783 UK GPs showed that 97% of GPs have used placebos in clinical
practice, and that so-called 'pure' placebos (e.g. sugar pills) are used
rarely but 'impure' placebos (e.g. homeopathy) are used frequently.
Qualitative analysis of GPs' comments revealed that they perceived a broad
array of perceived harms and benefits of placebo-prescribing, reflecting
fundamental bioethical principles at the level of the individual, the
doctor-patient relationship, the NHS, and society. While some GPs were
adamant that there was no place for placebos in clinical practice, others
saw placebo effects as ubiquitous and potentially beneficial in primary
care. Our focus group and survey research with patients demonstrates
similarly strongly-held and diverse views about harnessing placebo effects
in routine primary care. If placebo effects are to be better harnessed to
benefit patients, then patients and GPs would benefit from educational
interventions to dispel myths, challenge misconceptions, and increase
knowledge. I will finish by describing our current work to develop such
interventions.

16 November 2016 Jonathan RolisonUniversity of Essex Risk-taking
differences across adulthood: A question of age, domain, and self-perceptions.

Visual working memory (VWM) plays a key role in visual cognition,
comparing percepts and identifying changes in the world as they occur.
Previously, functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) has identified activation
in frontal, parietal and temporal areas involved in VWM processing. There
are, however, various issues with trying to use fMRI to investigate such
brain functions in infancy and childhood and even in late adulthood.
Instead, one can rely on functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to
investigate hemodynamic changes in the cerebral cortex in both typical and
atypical populations. Here, we will show a novel image reconstruction
approach to move from conventional channel-based to voxel-based fNIRS
activation, similar to what is obtained from fMRI analyses. I will
validate this approach by comparing voxel-wise fNIRS results to fNIRS
results from a VWM task in young adults. I will also present some evidence
of using this approach to investigate VWM changes in the brain across the
human life span.

Games involving cognitive skills of any kind have at least one
thing in common: an adult can without the slightest effort beat a
five-year-old child at them. With one exception: Concentration. The game
works like this. A deck of cards consisting of pairs of various images,
for example, pairs of images of various Pokemon characters: two Pikachu
cards, two Charizard cards, two Gyarados cards, etc., is randomly dealt
out, face down, on the table. Each of the two players takes turns turning
over two cards. If they match, they keep that pair of cards and play
again. If the two cards turned over do not match, they are turned face
down again in their original locations and the other player plays. The
game continues until there are no more cards on the table. The winner is
the person with the most cards. Clearly this game requires two different
memory skills: image-recollection and location-recollection. Along with
other researchers, we have shown that adults are very significantly better
at both of these memory skills than young children. And yet, children
perform as well, and often better, than adults at this game, one that
requires both image- and location-recognition! How on earth is this
possible? I present a simple connectionist model that provides an insight
for a possible solution to this paradox. The model suggests that no
separate mechanisms are required for children to achieve their
astonishingly good performance on this task. It also suggests a way for
you to not be humiliated by being thrashed by your five-year-old child at
this game...

19 October 2016 William Simpson Plymouth University What
causes the other-race effect? Evidence from classification images

2 October 2016 Graham Turpin - University of Sheffield Books
on prescription, self-help and trauma: a cautionary tale

Bibliotherapy and self-help are recognized features of many UK
mental health services. Since the pioneering work of Neil Frude, Books on
Prescription (BOP) Schemes have arisen in many NHS services through
partnerships with public libraries. At the same time, the importance of
'Stepped Care Models' of service delivery has been stressed, whereby Psychological
Wellbeing Practitioners offer low intensity psychological interventions
such as bibliotherapy and self-help. A recent national development by a
leading charity involving public libraries, the Reading Agency, has drawn
these two initiatives together. The progress made in rolling out
nationally the Reading Well Books on Prescription scheme covering common
mental health conditions, dementia, young people's mental health and
long-term physical conditions will be briefly reviewed. It cannot be
assumed, however, that every self-help intervention is effective in
moderating symptoms and psychological problems. Research on providing
self-help information to people who have recently attended hospital
Accident and Emergency departments will be presented. Although attendees
generally value being given relevant information, no evidence of the
efficacy of information provision on moderating symptoms of PTSD was
obtained in three independent RCTs. The implications of these studies for
self-help provision are discussed.

Reasoning is classically viewed as an individual skill enabling a
person to reach conclusions based on evidence. More recent accounts,
however, have highlighted that reasoning - in the more restricted sense of
explicating reasons for actions or conclusions - is a fundamentally social
skill enabling two or more people to produce and evaluate one another's
arguments in order to reach joint decisions (Mercier & Sperber, 2011;
Tomasello, 2014). Therefore, in making joint decisions with a partner,
children must evaluate the evidence behind their respective claims and so
the rationality of their respective proposals. In this talk I will present
series of studies in which 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children produced and
evaluated reasons with their peer partners to reach joint decisions. The
findings overall suggest that children as young as 3-year-olds are able to
reason with others. Children get better at reasoning in late preschool
ages and eventually become very 'strategic' reasoners at school ages.
Overall, these results support the view of children's joint reasoning as a
fundamentally cooperative enterprise aimed at making jointly rational
decisions.

The last 20 years have seen an explosion of interest in the self
within cognitive science. However, research on this topic has often been
disjointed with researchers from cognitive neuroscience emphasising the
importance of a bodily form of self which is formed by the integration of
sensory inputs and motor outputs while researchers from the social
sciences have tended to view the self as an abstract conceptual structure.
In this talk I will present a series of studies which investigated whether
bodily and conceptual forms of self-representation interact with one
another and how this affected our perceptions of other people. I will
first present a series of studies which investigated the effect of skin
colour on body ownership and found that experiencing body ownership over a
hand with the skin colour of a racial out-group led to more positive
implicit attitudes towards members of that racial out-group and modulated
their empathic motor resonance to painful stimuli on the hand of that
out-group member. I will go on to discuss a second series of studies that
examined the relationship between trust and body representation using
economic games and fMRI.

4 May 2016 Nicola Byrom - Oxford University: Attending
to the bigger picture; attentional breadth may be influencing how we construct
models of life experience

23 March 2016 - Ian Apperly- University of
Birmingham How do we take other people's perspectives, and who cares?

A growing literature on perspective-taking paints a complex
picture. Perspective-taking may be spatial or social; automatic or
controlled; and clearly depends on multiple cognitive mechanisms. I will
describe some recent results from adults and children that suggest there
is order in this chaos. One reason why we should care about this because
it provides a powerful framework for investigating individual differences
in healthy and pathological perspective-taking.

16 March 2016 - Jelena Havelka University of Leeds Visuospatial
bootstrapping effects in working memory

It has recently been demonstrated that immediate memory for digits
is superior when items are presented in a meaningful 'keypad' spatial
configuration. This phenomenon, termed 'visuospatial bootstrapping',
involves the integration of verbal and spatial information in working
memory via stored knowledge in long-term memory. We have recently explored
the basis of this effect experimentally using dual-task manipulations,
with outcomes indicating contributions to verbal-spatial binding from
spatial working memory and modality-general storage (possibly within the
episodic buffer). We have also examined the extent to which the effect
emerges in different population groups, including children of different
ages, healthy older adults, and individuals with mild cognitive
impairment. An overview of this recent work will be provided, along with a
consideration of current and future directions.

9 March 2016 - Reinout Wiers University of Amsterdam Assessing
and Changing Implicit Cognition in Addiction

Dual process models have described addiction as a combination of
relatively strong bottom-up cue-related neurocognitive processes and
relatively weak top-down cognitive control processes. In line with this
perspective, we found across several studies a larger impact of memory
associations and approach tendencies on behaviour in adolescents with
relatively weak cognitive. Dual-process models have recently come under
fire, but we think they can still be useful at a descriptive psychological
level, while more work should be done to illuminate the underlying
neurocognitive mechanisms. Moreover, dual process models inspired new
interventions aimed at changing relatively automatic processes in
addiction, varieties of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) paradigms. I will
present work on attentional re-training in alcoholism and on approach-bias
re-training which have yielded clinically relevant results. I will also
present some recent studies concerning online applications of CBM and on
the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in these training studies.

This presentation explores the processes involved in leaving social
movements or disengaging from terrorist activities by providing an
analysis of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Red Hand Commando (RHC)
transformation away from politically motivated violence towards a civilian
non-military role. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed
to gain an understanding of participant accounts of leaving violence
behind and disengaging from terrorism. Analysis of the interview
transcripts revealed the interplay of individual, organisation and
societal level processes in incentivising and obstructing disengagement
from politically motivated violence. The findings resonate with other case
studies exploring the processes involved in disengagement from political
violence among other terror groupings across the globe. The results are
discussed in relation to a number of topics, including the implementation
DDR in post-conflict societies, the dynamic role of collective identity in
the engagement in and disengagement from politically motivated violence
and the role of prison in shaping disengagement from politically motivated
violence.

24 February 2015 - Caroline Rowland University of Liverpool How
do children learn grammar? Evidence from production, comprehension and
explanatory models

Research on language development, particularly the development of
grammar, has traditionally focused on debating the extent to which
language learning depends on innate knowledge or environmental support. On
the one hand, many studies, mainly on speech production (e.g. Pine et al.,
1998), have suggested that children start out with pockets of knowledge
based round an inventory of item-based frames. This evidence supports an
approach that sees grammar development as a gradual process of abstraction
across specific instances in the child's input. On the other hand, a
different body of work, mainly on language comprehension, suggests that
children use abstract grammatical categories from the earliest age tested
(e.g. Gertner et al., 2006). This evidence supports an approach that
proposes innate syntactic, semantic or conceptual knowledge at the core of
grammar acquisition, and which predicts more rapid learning. However,
recent work suggests that this is a false dichotomy; children and adults
have both abstract knowledge and knowledge centred around lexical items at
all stages of development. Thus, the traditional approaches are breaking
down. What is replacing them is a focus on explanatory models designed to
answer a different question: 'How do the child's learning mechanisms
exploit information in the environment to build mature linguistic
knowledge?' In this talk I use recent work from our lab to demonstrate what
this approach has taught us so far about grammar acquisition, focussing on
work that demonstrates what kind of learning mechanism best explains
developmental differences in structural priming. I show how this new
approach requires that we factor into our models the mechanisms underlying
language processing, since the results of all studies on children's
language development reflect not only children's knowledge of their
language, but also the processing constraints that operate when we produce
or comprehend language.

17 February 2015 - Sylvia
Terbeck Plymouth University Recent development of two
topics: Music and intergroup relations and Immersive Virtual Reality and
intergroup relations

Social psychology might benefit from a multimodal approach
including insides from music psychology as well as computer science. We
recently found that music and synchronised activity might enhance empathy
and reduce prejudice. Furthermore, besides using traditional questionnaire
based methods we developed a 3D immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) paradigm
to study moral and social decisions. We found the IVR paradigm to be
superior to previous methods as "dark tirade" personality
variables could predict the more realistic IVR actions but not the
theoretical decisions. Using IVR might thus have great benefit to the
study of psychology, and I will show you how simple *programming* could
be.

20 January 2015 Allegra
Cattani Plymouth University Children's first words and
gestures: A cross-linguistic study

Word and gesture learning emerge naturally in the child
development. Infants learn to speak and to gesture following the
same developmental milestones. First, a new picture naming task,
with standardisation norms of over 370 English-speaking British children,
assessing the lexical subcomponents of comprehension and production in
toddlers between 19 and 36 months, is presented. This structured task
is then used to examine the lexical ability and the gesture production on
a sample of British, Australian, and English toddlers. The effects
of cultural and linguistic differences are explained.

13 January2016Markus Binderman University of Kent Resource
limits as the cause of errors in face matching

In face matching, observers have to decide whether two photographs
of unfamiliar faces depict the same person or different people. This task
is of great applied importance for person identification at airports and
national borders, but it is also prone to error. In this talk, I will look
at a key cause of these errors.

Stories are the shared memories and aspirations through which we
make meaning. They give us explanations about cause and effect, and about
what is important to attend to in the past. They position us in relation
to others and other groups. Stories both shape and reflect our identity,
and they fuel our efficacious engagement with social issues. Attitude
measurement, the "gold standard" of social research, can at best
only capture the superficial level of beliefs and especially of motives.
Drawing on data from China and South Africa, I argue that we should be
seeking explanations of civic and social action and civic identities in the
narratives that are central to people's identities

Anecdotal evidence and experimental investigations indicate that
older people experience increased speech-perception difficulties,
especially in noisy environments. Since peripheral hearing sensitivity
declines with age, lower speech intelligibility can often be explained by
a reduction in audibility. However, aided speech-perception in
hearing-impaired listeners frequently falls short of the performance level
that would be expected based on the audibility of the speech signal. Given
that many of these listeners are older, poor performance may be caused by
age-related changes in supra-threshold auditory and/or cognitive processes
that are not captured by the standard clinical assessment - the audiogram.
The presentation will discuss experimental evidence obtained from
clinically normal-hearing adults showing that auditory temporal
processing, cognition (e.g. processing speed, attention, memory), and
speech-in-noise processing (from phoneme identification to paragraph
comprehension) are indeed linked and, independently of hearing loss,
decline across the adult lifespan. These findings highlight the need to
take into account these audibility-unrelated factors in the prediction and
rehabilitation of speech processing across adulthood.

25 November 2015 - Jon
May Plymouth University 'I can resist anything except
temptation': a cognitive-motivational intervention to support abstinence

One of the biggest psychological barriers to quit attempts are
cravings for the substance or activity from which people are trying to
abstain. Elaborated Intrusion theory (Kavanagh, Andrade & May, 2005)
explains cravings as cognitive-emotional states in which external or internal
cues trigger intrusive thoughts (I need a drink) that are then elaborated,
generating embodied images of the desired substance. These images are rich
in sensory detail (the appearance, smell and taste of a drink), simulating
the desired experience and conveying the pleasure or relief of the real
thing. Being proximal and concrete, these highly vivid images dominate
experience and drive out the intention to abstain. I shall review evidence
from laboratory and field studies testing EI theory, and present some
preliminary data on a novel motivational intervention called Functional
Imagery Training, or FIT. The focus of FIT is on making the imagery
associated with succeeding in a quit attempt richer and more concrete, so
that it can compete with the shorter term temptations, and help people to
withstand them.

During mass uprisings, why do certain people join the protests
against their governments, while others stay at home? Focusing on
structural or organizational factors that contribute to political
mobilization, much of the existing literature fails to address this
difference in behavior. In response, this presentation draws on the
literature on beliefs and belief systems to explore the reasoning
processes by which individuals (fail to) decide to join political
protests. Focusing on the Arab Spring as a particular case, it examines
121 protestors and non-protestors from Egypt - a country where the Arab
Spring protests led to the fall of the president - and Morocco - a country
where the head of state did not resign as a result of the uprisings.
Information about the reasoning processes of these individuals was
gathered through field research (ethnographic interviews) and Facebook
groups. To construct reasoning processes from these sources, the analysis
applied qualitative methods developed by Strauss and Corbin, coding the
people's direct speech into beliefs, belief connections (inferences), and
decisions for actions. To analyze these data, which consist of trillions
of combinations of beliefs and inferences, the analysis developed a
computational model (in Python). The model systematically evaluates the
protestors' and non-protestors' reasoning processes, contributing new
insight into the sources of political protest.

11 November 2015 - Clare Press Birkbeck, University of London Mapping
between action and action perception: Domain-specificity and implications for
autism

Mechanisms which map between the visual appearance of an action and
the motor codes required to perform it are crucial for a range of
functions, including imitation and action control, and possibly also play
a role in action perception and understanding. The first part of my talk
will present some studies addressing the domain-specificity of underlying
mechanisms. It will examine whether the mechanisms mapping motor codes to
observed actions are separable from those mapping motor codes to
associated inanimate events, as required for stamping on the brake pedal
when we see a red light. It will also investigate whether action
influences perception of predicted sensory consequences in a different
manner from inanimate predictive events. The second part of my talk will
present work addressing differences in action production and perception in
autism, and asking which mechanisms may be functioning atypically.

4 November 2015 - Fred Cummins University
College Dublin Prayer, Protest and Football: the Puzzles of Joint Speech

Joint speech is an umbrella term covering choral speech,
synchronous speech, chant, and all forms of speech where many people say
the same thing at the same. Under an orthodox linguistic analysis, there
is nothing here to study, as the formal symbolic structures of joint
speech do not appear to differ from those of language arising in other
forms of practice. As a result, there is essentially no body of scientific
inquiry into practices of joint speaking. Yet joint speaking practices are
ubiquitous, ancient, and deeply integrated into rituals and domains to
which we accord the highest significance. I will discuss Joint Speech, as
found in prayer, protest, classrooms, and sports stadia around the world.
If we merely take the time to look there is much to be found in joint
speech that is crying out for elaboration and investigation. I will
attempt to sketch the terra incognita that opens up and present a few
initial findings (phonetic, anthropological, neuroscientific) that suggest
that Joint Speech is far from being a peripheral and exotic special case.
It is, rather, a central example of language use that must inform our
theories of what language and languaging are.

21 October 2015 Stephen
Hall, Plymouth University. Brain rhythms: where do they come from
and what do they mean?

Brain rhythms or ‘Oscillations’ are neuronal network phenomena,
first recorded almost a century ago. In the time since these first
recordings, brain rhythms have been studied across a wide range of
species, under many different experimental conditions. Here, I will
introduce the topic of brain rhythms, through a discussion of the various
cognitive and behavioural functions in which they have been implicated. I
will describe some of the basic physiological principles of oscillations
and how this relates to our ability to measure them. I will discuss some
of the differences between evoked and induced oscillations. Finally, I
will explore some of the theories surrounding the potential significance
and importance of these phenomena (or epiphenomena?).

25 March 2015 - Douglas Martin, University of Aberdeen. How do
cultural stereotypes form?

We all share knowledge of the cultural stereotypes associated with
social groups (e.g., Scottish people are miserly, scientists are geeky,
men like the colour blue) – but what are the origins of these stereotypes?
We have examined the possibility that stereotypes form spontaneously as
information is repeatedly passed from person to person. As information
about novel social targets is passed down a chain of individuals, what
initially begins as a set of random associations evolves into a system
that is simplified and categorically structured. Following repeated social
transmission, novel stereotypes emerge that are not only increasingly
learnable but that also allow generalizations to be made about previously
unseen social targets. By understanding how cognitive and social factors
influence the cumulative cultural evolution of stereotypes in the lab, it
might be possible to gain insight into how stereotypes might naturally
evolve or be manipulated.

Human listeners are better than machines at perceiving and
comprehending speech – particularly if the speech signal is acoustically
degraded or ambiguous. This is in part because we are better at using
higher-level language knowledge to support perception and we are more able
to rapidly learn about speech sounds, words and meanings. In this talk I
will argue that a computational account of speech perception based on predictive
coding explains both our ability to use prior knowledge to guide immediate
perception, and longer-term perceptual learning. I will describe recent
behavioural, MEG/EEG and multivoxel pattern-analysis fMRI experiments
using artificially degraded (noise-vocoded) speech that are consistent
with this account.

11 March 2015 -Bradley Love, University College London. Decoding
the brain's algorithm for categorisation from its neural implementation.

How do we learn to categorise novel items and what is the brain
basis of these acts? In this talk, I will discuss work using model-based
fMRI analyses to understand how people learn categories from examples. I
will focus on category structures that have a rule-plus-exception
structure. For example, a child may acquire the rule “If it has wings,
then it is a bird,” but then must account for exceptions to this rule,
such as bats. Results indicate that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays
an important role in both recognising and learning exception items. I will
end by considering a new method that allows one to use fMRI data to decide
between competing cognitive models. Results indicate that the basis of
category knowledge is surprisingly concrete (i.e., exemplar or episodic)
in nature. This technique allows one to unravel the contributions of
different processes (e.g., top-down attention) in shaping observed
behaviour.